Nurburgring: Yamaha Saturday notes

Tom Sykes on form with blistering pace in first German qualifying
Yamaha World Superbike rider Tom Sykes looked immediately at home in
familiar weather conditions on the Nurburgring circuit today. Although an
issue in the first free practice ...

Tom Sykes on form with blistering pace in first German qualifying

Yamaha World Superbike rider Tom Sykes looked immediately at home in
familiar weather conditions on the Nurburgring circuit today. Although an
issue in the first free practice session meant missing out on some lap
time, the British rider made up for it in the afternoon, and despite a
small crash he moved quickly up the ranks to finish the first qualifying
session in second place, half a second off provisional pole man Jonathan
Rea.

Team-mate Ben Spies worked to find the right set up today, taking his
time to understand how his bike performed in the wet conditions and
hunting the perfect combination of bike set up and tyre choice. By the
end of qualifying he was confident that the right combination had been
found and was looking forward to bringing his lap times down in
tomorrow's second qualifying session and following Superpole.

Tom Sykes, Yamaha World Superbike Team (2nd, 2'11.781)

"We started off steady this morning, we knew we had a couple of issues to
sort out which took some time. We were also struggling for grip to start
with but we made changes which worked. I went back out on a new tyre with
all the changes in place and unfortunately the tyre wasn't up to
temperature so I lost the back end. I managed to low side it gently and
had no damage so got back on and carried on. We had a good gap in the
weather so I chipped away at the time. I think maybe we can improve a bit
more but I was really impressed with how much grip we were finding."

Ben Spies, Yamaha World Superbike Team (13th, 2'13.898)

"Today went ok, we weren't as high up in the time sheets as we wanted to
be but it's always hard coming to a track and learning it in the wet when
you don't know how the tarmac works in the rain. We worked on some set up
stuff and towards the end of the session we started to get down to some
better times than what we had been doing before. By the time we got to a
really good set up we realized we had the wrong tyres on at the end of
the session, there's pretty much one set of tyres that are working well
in the rain and we weren't on them. We learnt a lot about the bike in the
rain, we've found something pretty good so we just need to try some
different rubber tomorrow and I'm sure the lap times will start to
tumble."

Massimo Meregalli, Yamaha World Superbike Team Manager

"for sure the conditions we had today are the worst for learning a track.
We have to wait for tomorrow's weather and hope it is better, but still
we remain confident. Tom achieved some great results, I think the typical
English weather helped him! He's showed us that he's always focusing on
improving so we're happy."